I am amazed at how structured the operation was. Is there any estimate as to how profitable a campaign on this scale (or any scale for that matter, I do not know where money enters into the equation)?
Author here, we don't know their profit, but we estimate that they've spent about $220,000 through 2017, which is fairly cheap if you want to blast 1 billion malverts across the interwebs.
Ad spent estimate seems to be very low. Most players operating out of Russia often spend 10-20K a day, so 200K is just 10 days worth of adspend. But such guys often have 10-20 people working for them on <$1-2K monthly wage. (For Russia/Eastern Europe or heck South Asia it's quite good)
ROI on such campaigns can be anywhere between 150-600% or even more.
Thanks for the response. Really to bad that one doesn't know how much the profit was. The setup seems pretty sophisticated from a business standpoint. Does one generally suspect traditional organized crime groups to set these things up, or are these done by smaller, newer groups?